Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

March 1997 - GCSE Computer Science 5-a-day

Every sheet in March 1997

The same date always regenerates the same five questions, so a sheet you print today is the sheet a classmate prints tomorrow.

  1. 1st March 1997An uncompressed file is 6000 KB. After lossless compression it is 1500 KB. Calculate the compression ratio in the form n:1 (original size : compressed size).
  2. 2nd March 1997Which of RAM and ROM is volatile, meaning its contents are lost when the power is removed?
  3. 3rd March 1997Which piece of UK legislation controls how organisations must store and use people's personal data?
  4. 4th March 1997Given x = 5 and y = 8, state whether x < y AND x > 0 evaluates to True or False.
  5. 5th March 1997A function is defined as: FUNCTION addTax(price) RETURN price x 1.2 ENDFUNCTION. Another line of code runs: total <- addTax(20) + addTax(30). Trace both function calls and state the final value of total.
  6. 6th March 1997Give one reason why RAM on its own is not enough, and a computer also needs secondary storage.
  7. 7th March 1997State the layer that IP operates in, and describe its job.
  8. 8th March 1997A password field requires between 6 and 12 characters. State two boundary data values that should be used to test this field.
  9. 9th March 1997A table called staff has fields staffId, name, department and salary, storing these records: staffId | name | department | salary, 1 | Ben | Sales | 24000, 2 | Chloe | IT | 31000, 3 | Dan | Sales | 27000. State which staffId(s) would be returned by: SELECT staffId FROM staff WHERE department = 'Sales' AND salary > 25000;
  10. 10th March 1997State one function carried out by the operating system of a computer.
  11. 11th March 1997In computational thinking, what is meant by the term 'decomposition'?
  12. 12th March 1997Given A = 1 and B = 1, state the value of A AND B.
  13. 13th March 1997Convert the 8-bit binary number 01011010 to denary.
  14. 14th March 1997Define a peer-to-peer network.
  15. 15th March 1997Describe what syntax highlighting is and how it helps a programmer.
  16. 16th March 1997Convert the denary number 5 to a 4-bit binary number.
  17. 17th March 1997A CPU has a clock speed of 4.0 GHz. Calculate how many clock cycles it completes in 2 seconds.
  18. 18th March 1997A simple cipher shifts every letter 2 places forward in the alphabet, wrapping around so Y becomes A and Z becomes B. Encrypt the plaintext CAT using this cipher.
  19. 19th March 1997Trace this algorithm with data = [4, 9, 2, 9, 7] and state the final output. total = 0; count = 0; for i = 0 to 4: if data[i] > 5 then total = total + data[i] and count = count + 1; next i; print(total, count).
  20. 20th March 1997A mono sound clip has a sample rate of 4000 Hz and lasts 2 seconds. Calculate the total number of samples taken.
  21. 21st March 1997State the type of program that is typically stored in ROM.
  22. 22nd March 1997State one reason a small business might choose to use open source software instead of proprietary (closed source) software.
  23. 23rd March 1997A FOR loop runs: total = 0, FOR i = 1 TO 4, total = total + i, NEXT i. State the value of total after the loop finishes.
  24. 24th March 1997Write the pseudocode header and body for a function called isAdult that takes one integer parameter called age and returns True if age is 18 or over.
  25. 25th March 1997State the typical maximum capacity of a single-layer DVD.
  26. 26th March 1997Explain the role of TCP when a large file is downloaded.
  27. 27th March 1997State what is meant by a syntax error.
  28. 28th March 1997State what a foreign key is used for.
  29. 29th March 1997What type of utility software reorganises files on a hard disk so fragmented parts are stored closer together?
  30. 30th March 1997Calculate the maximum number of comparisons required by a binary search on a sorted list of 512 items.
  31. 31st March 1997Given P = 0 and Q = 1, state the value of P OR Q.